One of the sessions of today’s Paywall Strategies conference focussed on lessons from other countries, hearing from Berlingske Media, Denmark’s largest private media company, and from Piano Media, which has set up national subscription models in Slovakia and Slovenia.

Mads-Jakob Vad Kristensen, director of digital development at Berlingske Media, which has 2,000 employees and generates €400 million-a-year in revenue, explained how a range of titles, including tabloid, business-to-business and business-to-consumer publications are charging for content.

Not comfortable with the term paywall, Vad Kristensen shared the publisher’s lessons.

He gave the example of how Berlingske Media title BT Plus started by removing content “nice and slowly”, beginning to charge readers in April 2011.

Perhaps due to the season, a surprise first success in encouraging people to pay was an article on ’17 ways to spring clean your house’.

1. People will pay

“If you have the right content people will pay for it, even in the consumer space,” he said.

However, he admitted the publisher “has not yet cracked” what makes young people part with their cash.

2. Travel guides are a hit

Another lesson from the Danish publisher is that “travel guides are a hit”, with people prepared to pay for digital city guides.

Many go on to pay for a €4-a-month subscription as that is the same price as an individual guide. And then they forget to cancel their subscriptions.

3. Micropayments do not work

People will not pay for individual articles, was another lesson from the Danish publisher – even for an article advising people on “how to become a super lover” did not generate a single Kroner.

Mobile is going towards a paid model and digital is growing, Vad Kristensen said, revealing that “within a month we should have a new B2B offering, priced at around €40-a-month, purely digital product.”

4. Look at new forms of content

Vad Kristensen also urged publishers, especially of B2B and B2C titles, to consider the payment opportunities with new forms of content.

A joint model where several publishers team up to charge readers works, said Bella, giving examples of successes and feedback from publishers in Slovakia and Slovenia.

The individual titles decide how much content to put in the paid-for section of the site, which ranges from 0 to 60 per cent.

The site to have joined but has not put any content behind the wall is a TV station with an ad-free site. It took the stance that it is not losing anything – and some confused customers even sign up and pay.

Three months on from Slovakia’s group paywall going up around nine news outlets, with “promising results”, means a second small country is expected to adopt the model before the end of the year, according to Piano Media, the company which signed up the publishers and put up the paywall.

Tomas Bella, chief executive of Piano Media told Journalism.co.uk that the paywall generated €40,000 in the first month. The company aimed to sign up around 1 per cent of Slovakia’s 2.5 million internet uses in the first 12 months. He said that after three months the company has achieved two thirds of the target for the first year.

Bella said:

Piano expects to launch one more country this winter and it is likely that a few more countries will follow next year.

Bella did not reveal which countries are expected to follow Slovakia’s model explained that serious discussions are talking place.

We are now thinking about some of the smaller to medium-sized European countries which maybe some of the Scandanavian countries.

We’ve also had interest from France and from Australia.

Bella explained that Piano’s first foray into the bigger markets, such as France and Australia, is likely to trial group paywalls for regional news sites or parts of sites, such as sport.

Users are charged €2.90 a month to access content – a bit like paying a satellite or cable TV subscription to view channels owned by different broadcasters.

Piano developed an algorithm that times how long a reader spends on a site, with content weighted accordingly. So the longer a reader spends on a publisher’s site, the more revenue that publisher generates. Video therefore pays more than editorial and the model does not encourage crafty headline writing to generate clicks.

Some Slovak sites opted not to sign up to the paywall deal, Bella explained, but said the “the number of readers for the sites that went behind paywalls is basically very comparable to the sites that remained outside of the paywall”.

It didn’t cause any big drop in the number of readers, it caused only some drops in traffic to specific areas of the sites that went behind the paywall.

Bella also said visitors are moving between paywalled sites, a benefit of the joint model.

Funnily enough in June and July the news sites that are inside the Piano paywall were even doing a little bit better in traffic than the ones that are outside the paywall.

Bella has talked to 10 publishers in the UK and explained from next month the company will be negotiating a deal for a UK publisher with websites abroad.

He told Journalism.co.uk, he thinks adoption in Britain requires wider use elsewhere, with English language sites being far more difficult to sign up to a group paywall deal due to competition from abroad.

I’m not saying it won’t work in Britain but we have to prove it in two or three more countries first.

In Slovakia companies that opted out of the paywall initially will be joining next month.

Publishers that are already part of the group are now “fine tuning” what they put behind the wall. Additional content will go behind the wall and a small amount will be brought in front of the wall.

Changes will be made both ways but much more content is going behind the wall.

The funny thing is some of [the companies that did sign up] said we didn’t want to tell you before but we never thought it would work.

Bella said Piano Media had not heard of any publishers losing advertising revenue due to the wall.

Advertisers and media agencies might be a little worried as publishers are getting a little bit independent and less dependent on their revenue.

Yesterday nine news outlets in Slovakia joined together to put up a joint paywall in front of parts of its content – some more than others – as part of a new premium content subscription model by Piano Media.

The platform means users pay a monthly fee of €2.90 ($4.20) for unlimited access to all sites.

Once users have subscribed they will automatically be logged in to all of the participating sites, which in Slovakia currently includes Pravda and SME, along with video portals, tv stations and magazines.

Publishers have decided how much content they wish to place behind the paywall, some closing almost all their content to non-paying users while others are leaving general news free and instead selecting content such as commentaries as premium material to be paid for.

The paywall launched yesterday with a free two-week trial, with charges coming into effect from 2 May.

We spoke to Piano Media CEO Tomas Bella, about the reaction from within Slovakia so far.

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In the coming weeks and months there are plans to incorporate the subscriptions within Internet Service Provider packages, to be offered to users when they sign up for their connection, as well as launches in other countries such as the Czech Republic.

Bella told Journalism.co.uk the aim is for after the first year to have 0.8 to 1.5 per cent of internet users paying subscriptions to the system and five to 15 per cent after three or four years.